“... some days before the Fourth Plenum, when he responded to the charges against him with 11 points of self-defence, key among them that the students’ demands had not posed a threat to Party rule and that the crisis could have been settled peacefully if the other leaders had accepted his advice to withdraw the label ‘turmoil’ (i.e. riot) used in the 26 April ...”

“... operations aimed at ‘winning hearts and minds’ – as if these phrases were not shrouded in self-parody, as if the strategy they describe had not ended in catastrophe. Public memory is short. Outside policy circles, one might hope to find a richer repository of inconvenient truths. Yet here too the results are disappointing. A few novelists have made ...”

“... they are beyond the design flaws of humanity’, although the profits of the pharmaceutical or self-help industries might suggest otherwise. In Paris (where I live) he sees cartoon figures: ‘the men in salmon-coloured pants and white linen and bright sweaters tied around their necks, the men who disappeared around corners and circled back in luxury ...”

“... which is never complete and in which the Western I is involved in a continuous discovery of the Self in the Other. As a concrete example of this, Piault points to the work of Jean Rouch, his own mentor. For many, the octogenarian Rouch is the most accomplished ethnographic film-maker of his generation. He is certainly among the most prolific, having made ...”

“... Ian Campbell Ross’s new biography provides an introductory cameo of Sterne’s triumph of self-marketing. He made himself available to his admirers, the measure and embodiment of his fictional imagination. After a week he was writing home to say he was ‘engaged allready to ten Noble men & men of fashion to dine’. He loved performing in the drawing ...”

“... and now in Trier on von Trier. Discussing each of his films in turn, he emerges as a self-mocking and contradictory man of undisguised ambition, oscillating between shyness and exhibitionism. Most revealing is his antipathy to contemporary cinema. ‘There’s certainly something lacking in films today,’ he says. ‘A lot of what’s made is ...”

“... bears an uncanny resemblance to the narrator – becomes obsessed with the mysteries of European self-fashioning. Over the course of several years, he and the narrator study one another, gazing into mirrors and writing answers to the question ‘Why am I what I am?’ Hoja decides that the Franks’ successes derive from their greater capacity for ...”

“... to hit the Statue of Liberty.’) Among Obama’s precursors is certainly Oprah Winfrey, the only self-made woman billionaire in America, who has built her television and magazine empire by assuming the role of an upbeat friend, helping you to help yourself. Obama’s slogan ‘Yes we can!’ is Oprah’s essential message; and it’s worth noting that some ...”

“... than pernicious.27 February. Good piece in this morning’s Guardian, a discussion between Will Self and Stewart Lee in which the latter describes the hostile reaction he sometimes has to face from audiences. At one point, ‘a guy got really angry. He said it wasn’t the audience’s fault they didn’t get what I was doing and I should be better at my ...”

“... for women. In this account people are always, but to varying degrees, enraged that they are not self-sufficient, that they aren’t omniscient, omnipotent gods; the happily dependent part of oneself thinks it is wonderful to live in a world in which people can do different things: the unhappily dependent part thinks, why can’t I do that? It couldn’t be ...”

“... punter, took ten years to write. It appeared in Australia in 1974, when Murnane was 35.A self-mythologising work of fiction, Tamarisk Row enfolds horse-racing, Catholicism and sin into the birth of its hero. Clement Killeaton is conceived the evening his father’s horse Clementia wins her maiden race, netting him a small fortune. Jean and Augustine ...”

“... fuzzy and so richly textured that they seem almost rotten. The stories move in such a private and self-sufficient way that they seem to leave no room for interpretation. It isn’t immediately clear how Schulz expects a reader to make contact. The clue is in the stories’ ambiguous relation to reality. Schulz is very fond of the seemingly innocuous word ...”

“... example – may be abstract, but they are not inert: they can provoke acts of violence or heroic self-sacrifice. From a philosophical point of view, the practical power of moral concepts has always been a bit of a mystery. Plato attributed it to the intrinsic attraction of the idea of the good, while anti-Platonists invoked long-range calculations of ...”

“... death in 2014, when a full collection of her poems appeared. Tonks loved Baudelaire in the same self-conscious way the young Patti Smith loved Rimbaud and Tom Verlaine loved his namesake. On the centenary of his death in 1967, she lay down next to his effigy in Montparnasse to confirm they were the same height, the king and queen of a rainy country.What ...”

“... that ‘seemed to be focused not on poems but on readers: they presented poetry as a species of self-help, a tool of personal growth like any other, valuable as a plumbable well of advice, reassurance and emotional uplift.’ Bucknell says that O’Hagan, along with other critics including Robert Potts and Mark Ford, saw this phenomenon as part of the ...”